Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Liberty

The attitude here is not that we are fucked, but one of lingering “woah.” I mean there aren’t even proper emoticons to express the awe and intensity of this Lolita concept, its sashaying coltish legs, nimble breasts, queer eye[1] for global domination…[cough]. Well anyway,Liberty, the fire of our loins…

Liberty demands our restraint. At first glance, liberty champions the freedom of the individual. It is a concept equated with freedom, free-will, and voluntary action. The difficulty is that the concept of liberty acts as a whorish muse for unrestrained freedom(s). Liberty constantly begs us for its absolute, rather than relative glory. In the a.m., liberty is a remainder; it is a poor elegy for an absolute subjective freedom courtesy of Saint Augustine.[2] Around brunch time, liberty makes us politically self-conscious; we/it become(s) democratic, civil and contained, kept in careful antagonism with equality and enjoyed amongst scones.[3] In our dreams, liberty becomes fantasist, the unrestrained ego, taking flight and violating gravity. Lastly, in 19th century Russian fits of passion, liberty demands its culmination, its total unconcealment, death. Liberty becomes a suppliant to death’s unknown, and as its subjects we enter into self-conscious and befuddled Kirilov-esque soliloquy. In this state, suicide is both a means of actualizing and a symptom of liberty’s catch-22 contract.

[1] It is precisely Liberty’s queer eye, its ambiguity, which makes it particularly exploitative[2] Interestingly, in Saint Augustine’s Confessions he is only able to define absolute subjective liberty through a recounting of false liberty or that temporal liberty of youth, which is of a hedonistic nature. If only Max Stirner (to be discussed later) had been given the ritual of confession he may have been capable of proper absolute liberty. But alas, Stirner’s dialogics were stuck in the Fisher-Price play-pen of the modern State.[3] In this case, liberty is an enabler for an absolute equality. Even the notion, equality of opportunity, is absolute in as much as its utopian i.e. of the spirit.